https://www.christiancentury.org/features/kendrick-lamar-playing-different-game

I’m just freestyling it here, so I forgot to include a couple of thoughts:

* For women trying to remove themselves from patriarchal systems and dynamics, it is so difficult to identify and distinguish our own voices from the messages we’ve been given (and from the rules we’ve learned about what, when, and how we’re to speak). We take that journey with very little expectation of being heard, understood, or validated. We take the journey knowing we’re more likely to experience the opposite, in fact.

* I keep seeing therapists of various kinds talking about healing spaces and the patterns that emerge in spaces designed for women only versus those that allow groups of mixed gender. In spaces where only women are present, women heal. In spaces where men are added to the mix, women inevitably care for them first. The men become the focus. This compulsion runs deep, and it’s either insanity or some very old programming. What’s worse, many men who come into healing spaces want to move as quickly as possible out of the actual healing phase and into a position of authority. They want to tell other people how to heal.

* Y’all.

* TLDR (or TLDL?): If men would like to convince the world that they are not the problem (“Not all men!”), they might try stepping away from the microphone and stepping down from the platform, risking the possibility of being unheard, misunderstood, and invalidated, thereby creating the ideal conditions for actual spiritual transformation.

(By the way, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about, let me know in the comments. Thanks for listening!)